Bike Lanes in Baltimore

The Mechanic and I traveled via Amtrak to Baltimore last Saturday to partake in the Baltimore Zoo’s Brew at the Zoo, which was a weekend event of bands and beers. The bands were okay, but the beers were fun – we tried 18 different ones between the two of us!

Cheers from the Baltimore Zoo!

We also attempted to use our DC SmarTrip cards on the Baltimore system, which didn’t work so well – I single-handedly crashed at least 6 gates trying to use my card! Oops. The kind metro worker let me in, but I bought a one way fare card for the way back to the Amtrak station after we left the zoo. The Mechanic’s SmarTrip card worked fine on our way, but not on the return, so he bought one too. Bummer! Next time I guess we’ll have to buy Charm Cards.

oops!

After our fun at the zoo, we ended up in Little Italy for dinner. Actually, we ended up in Vaccaro’s Italian Pastry Shop, a small Italian place we had stumbled upon in January when we were last in the area. The paninis are unbelievable, and how can you not love a place that offers olives and Asiago cheese as a side?! The line for cookies was too long, or we would have gotten cookies too.

Yum! Paninis from Vaccaro’s

But here is where I have to geek out a bit – there were all these cool bike lanes in Little Italy! Or at least on this one street we were on – a sharrows headed west and on the same street, an east-bound bike lane! On the same street!

Personally, I might have been a bit weirded out to bike towards oncoming traffic, even parked cars, but it’s great that they have this! I didn’t actually see anyone biking on it when we went by (come to think of it, I didn’t see anyone on a bike at all), but I hope that people actually do. It’s in a great location near the harbor, so there should be plenty of cyclists. I guess I need to look up bicycle riding stats for Baltimore – does anyone know if there is a big bike culture there or not? I know I’ve seen other bike lanes around the harbor, but what about away from there?

There are certainly a ton of fun bike racks all over the harbor area! I hope that means they are well used. If we could get our bikes up to Baltimore on Amtrak (don’t get me started on train laws regarding bicycles around here!), I know we would use the lanes and the racks! Maybe later this summer we will have to check it out….